The Rev. Dayle Casey
The Chapel of Our Saviour
Colorado Springs, Colorado
October 19, 2008

Proper 24 – Year A
Isaiah 45:1-7
1 Thessalonians 1:1-10
Matthew 22:15-22

For the past several weeks we’ve heard a number of Jesus’ parables about the kingdom of God, parables that got under the skin of the religious authorities in Israel, who correctly understood that Jesus was aiming his stories straight at them. Jesus’ parables suggested that the priests and the pharisees of Israel were maybe not going to inherit the kingdom of God, because maybe they didn’t have things quite as straight with God as they thought they did.

The priests and pharisees, the religious and political authorities in Israel, ended up looking like those in Jesus’ stories who refused to accept God’s invitation to his heavenly feast, even like the wicked tenants who killed God’s prophets and were trying to steal God’s vineyard. And by the time they meet with Jesus this morning, they have had enough. They are becoming concerned that Jesus might be undermining their power and influence among the people. They want to have Jesus arrested, Matthew tells us, but they are afraid of the crowds, because the crowds looked on Jesus as a prophet.

So the pharisees go away to caucus, and they agree on a plan to trap Jesus in an argument, so that they might make him look bad in the eyes of the people. They get some of the priests from Herod’s party to join them in their plan, and they all go to Jesus and begin to flatter him in an attempt to trap him: “Teacher,” they say, “we know you are a sincere man. We know that you teach the ways of obedience and service to God, not caring what anyone thinks, whoever he might be. So we’d like your answer to a question that has been troubling us. Tell us, give us your ruling: Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?”

This was a major political question in Jesus’ day, because the pharisees didn’t like having foreigners in power in their own land. They opposed paying taxes to Caesar, to Rome. But Herod’s party, the priests, supported Caesar, because their power and status depended on their being Rome’s loyal agents in Israel. But both groups were concerned about Jesus, because Jesus was a loose cannon who didn’t seem to show anyone in authority much respect. So they hoped to force Jesus into taking sides on a question as politically divisive in his day as this year’s elections are in ours.

“Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar, or not?” If Jesus answers “yes,” he will come down on the side of the Herodians, whose loyalty to Caesar was clear but whose obedience to God was questionable in the eyes of the pharisees. If Jesus answers “no,” he will line up with the pharisees, and maybe make himself look, in the eyes of Caesar, like one who pals around with terrorists. Either way, Jesus would lose, and either the pharisees or the Herodians would claim victory. “What about these foreigners, Jesus, the Romans, do they belong here in Israel, or not? Should we support a government that carries the image of a foreign god on its coins, or not? Is it permissible to pay taxes to Caesar, or not? Whose side are you on, Jesus?”

And Jesus said, ”Show me the coin used for the tax.” And someone handed him a denarius, the silver Roman coin the tax was to be paid with, and Jesus asked, ”Whose image is this on the coin, and whose inscription?” And they said, ”Caesar's.” And Jesus said, ”Render unto Caesar that which is Caesar’s, and unto God that which is God’s.”

But there’s the rub for the priests and the pharisees, just as it’s the rub for us as well. For Jesus’ response left his interrogators, as it leaves us this morning, with a further question: ”What belongs to God, and what belongs to Caesar?” The silver coin, the denarius, clearly belonged to Caesar. It had Caesar’s image on it, just as our dollar bill has George Washington’s image on it. But what belongs to God? Just what do I have of God’s that I am to render unto God?

Jesus is not talking about the separation of church and state here. Separation of church and state is a modern notion, something unheard of in ancient times. Instead, Jesus is leading us to consider something much more basic than that. Jesus is reminding us, just as he reminded his disciples and the priests and the pharisees of his own day, that “the earth is the Lord’s and all that is in it, the world and all who dwell therein.” (Psalm 24:1) Jesus is asking us to consider where our allegiance, our worship, ultimately lies. He is reminding us who we belong to.

“Watch yourselves carefully,” Jesus had earlier cautioned his disciples, ”so [that] you don’t get contaminated with Pharisee yeast, with Pharisee phoniness. You can’t keep your true self hidden forever; before long you’ll be exposed. You can’t hide behind a religious mask forever; sooner or later your true face will be known. You can’t whisper one thing in private and preach the opposite in public: the day is coming when those whispers will be repeated all over town. I’m speaking to you as dear friends. Don’t be bluffed into silence or insincerity by the threats of religious bullies. True, they can kill you, but then what can they do? There’s nothing they can do to your soul, your core being. Save your fear, [your worship,] for God, who holds your entire life – body and soul – in his hands.” (Luke 12:1b-5, Eugene Peterson translation)

“John Calvin famously said that the human mind is a permanent factory of idols,” William Willimon tells us. “We so want to find some means of security, protection, and comfort, other than God. We long for some god of this world. For some it’s the government, for others it’s the pills, or self-image.” For some it is health food or jogging, for others it is the Nasdaq or the Dow. The list is endless, because the number of our idols is endless. But the truth is that the span of our lives is seventy years, maybe eighty or more if given the strength, and in the end all our idols, the gods of this world, fail us, and there is only the one God, the God of the heavens and the earth.

Is Caesar’s image stamped on this coin? Then let Caesar have it; it’s just a piece of metal, just another golden calf fashioned by human hands. But that piece of metal and the power to kill your body is all Caesar can lay claim to. We belong to God. We ourselves were made by God, and we are to worship only Him who created us and gave us life and brought us out of slavery into freedom, the One “who holds our lives themselves – body and soul – in his hands.” We are to give our lives, that which belongs to God, to God.

To remember this, to remember where we come from and whose we are, is why we come to church. We come to church to get a perspective on our lives that is different from Caesar’s. We come to church, as the priests and pharisees went to Jesus, to be reminded that we are to render unto Caesar only what belongs to Caesar and to render unto God what belongs to God. We come to church to be reminded that God has stamped his image upon us, and that therefore we belong to God, who alone is the source and the measure of our lives.

Willimon tells a story that we’ve all heard before at some time, how he met a woman who had lived through a tremendous disaster, a hurricane and flood. And when he offered her a word of sympathy, she simply said, ”Well, I have lost my house, my car, my furniture, my clothing, all my personal possessions and keepsakes, but one thing I have learned is that it is not right to say that I have lost everything. I lost a lot of material stuff, but I am here, and my family is still with me. Let’s just say that God has powerfully reminded me of what is valuable and what is not.”

Now Willimon adds that he doesn’t know if he believes that God sent that disaster to teach her something, but that he does believe that God can take even the worst events of our lives and use them to show how relatively unimportant is so much of the stuff we spend so much of our lives trying to accumulate and protect.

We come to church to remember this truth without having to live through a hurricane or a dive in the Dow to have it driven home. We come to church to render unto God what is God’s – our thanksgiving for his creation and for his protection and guidance in our lives, without which we would be nothing. We come to church to remember that this worship and thanksgiving is an offering that we rightfully remember to make every day of our lives, not just on Sundays. We also come to church to remember that this same worship and thanksgiving should guide us not just as individuals, but as a people.

Franklin Roosevelt understood this truth. In the spring of 1944, during the dark days of World War II, Roosevelt asked the clergy at St. John’s Church on Lafayette Square to prepare a service to commemorate the anniversary of his first inauguration, a service that had been held annually for the eleven years of his presidency. The young curate at St. John’s was assigned to prepare the service, and he decided to include a “Prayer For Our Enemies.” The senior clergy objected: “The White House would never authorize it in wartime. It would be misunderstood throughout the country, [and] the publicity would be terrible....” But, as Jon Meacham relates in his book American Gospel, when Roosevelt read over the proposed service, ”he scribbled a note next to the prayer: ‘Very good – I like it.’ FDR recognized that humility, not hubris, was the proper posture for a nation whose sons were under fire,” just as Martin Luther had insisted four hundred years earlier that when Christians find that they have to go to war, we should do so praying not only for ourselves, but for our enemies, because the whole world, not just the part we happen to live in, belongs to God.

So when the President and his cabinet and senior officials gathered for worship on March 4, 1944, they bowed their heads and their hearts to God as this petition was offered: “Most loving Father, who by thy Son Jesus Christ has taught us to love our enemies and to pray for them: We beseech thee, give to those who are now our enemies the light of thy Holy Spirit. Grant that they, and we, being enlightened in conscience and cleansed from every sin, may know and do thy will, and so be changed from foes to friends united in thy service; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.”

That too, we come to church to do – to ask that in war and peace alike, even in elections, our pride might be turned to humility, and our fear to hope, in the presence of the God who is Lord and Friend of our adversaries as well as of ourselves.

So what has Jesus done here in our Gospel passage today? “He has taken our political question and made it into a worship question,” Willimon insists. “In whose image are you stamped?” Jesus asks us. “Who is the object of your highest devotion? Who owns you? What are you going to render to the one to whom you belong?”

As usual, Jesus refuses to get engaged on the level of political issues, because he didn’t come to live among us to speak to political issues, but to speak to human hearts. “Whose side are you on?” we always seem to be demanding of Jesus. “You’re for America, aren’t you, Jesus? Are you a liberal or a conservative, Jesus? Are you a Republican or a Democrat? You’re for law and order, aren’t you, Jesus? In difficult times like ours, Jesus, with terrorists on the loose and all, which is more important, Jesus, liberty or security? Are you for the war in Iraq, or not? You’re for family values, aren’t you, Jesus? Come on, Jesus, tell us. Here is a woman caught in adultery; are you for zero tolerance for criminals, or not? What kind of answer is that, Jesus? – ‘Render unto Caesar what is Caesar’s, and unto God what is God’s.’ We live in a dangerous, uncertain world, Jesus. Why don’t you give us some answers?”

But again this morning, as usual, Jesus refuses to give us voting-booth answers. Instead, he leaves us with the freedom God created us for, the freedom to render unto Caesar that which belongs to Caesar and to render unto God that which belongs to God, and the freedom to find out which is which, or not.

As always, Jesus does not offer us bumper-sticker answers, but a vision – a vision of loving God with all our hearts and souls and minds, and of loving our neighbor as ourselves. He gives us a vision of a kingdom in which we are free to make God’s choices our own choices, a vision of a kingdom in which the coin of the realm is justice and mercy and compassion and reconciliation, a vision of a kingdom in which all that we have in our pockets and all that we have in our hearts might be spent on God’s dream for his world, because that is where our real treasure is.

“What good is it to be pro-this and anti-that?” Jesus asks. “I’m calling you to something larger than labels. I’m asking you to look at the world and to see it as God sees it. I’m asking you to understand – no, I’m asking you yourselves to image in your own life – God’s dream for his world. I’m challenging you to reflect God’s dream of justice and mercy and compassion and reconciliation in your own life. I’m challenging you to spend your life on God’s dream, to spend your life loving God and loving your neighbor as yourself.”

The human mind is a permanent factory of idols. “So when your flag passes by,” Willimon cautions, “and when you vote, and when you are asked to support some government policy, when you are considering the future of your nation, your town, and what you ought to do about it, be careful! Don’t give to the state that which you ought to give to God.”

Which side will Jesus come down on? That’s the question we ask. Is Jesus on our side, or not? And Jesus gives the question back to us: Whose side are you on? Whose image do you bear? Will you render unto God that which belongs to God?”

And that’s good news. Because, as Paul said to the Christians in Thessalonika, God has great confidence in us. God believes in us more than we ourselves believe in us. God has chosen us to get his world back for him, chosen us to bear his image here, in our time and in this place. And the image we bear, and our selves who bear that image, are precisely the one life that God asks for. How we spend these lives, whether we spend them in fear or in hope, is up to us.

In the Name of God, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Amen.